Saturday, 29 September 2012

Sir John Vanbrugh's south facade of Castle Howard, commissioned in 1699; residence of the Howard family, formerly the Earls of
Carlisle, and filming location for the "Brideshead Revisted"
miniseries (Yorkshire, England): photo by diverstonefly 29 August 2006

Under this stone, Reader, surveyDead Sir John Vanbrugh's House of Clay.Lie heavy on him, Earth! For heLaid many Heavy Loads on thee!

Abel Evans (1679-1737): On Sir John Vanbrugh (The Architect). An Epigrammatical Epitaph (1726)

South (garden) face of Castle Howard, Yorkshire: photo by Pwojdacz, 21 March 2006

Castle Howard, west wing: photo by Paul Allison, 15 March 2005

Castle Howard, south front: photo by Richard Croft, 5 June 1991

Castle Howard from over the Great Lake: photo by John Nicholson, 30 July 2007

Castle Howard Mausoleum, with potato field in foreground: photo by Colin Grice, 28 May 2006

Sir John Vanbrugh's Temple of the Four Winds in the grounds of Castle Howard, near York: photo by Peter Astbury, 16 August 2010

Vanbrugh's
monumental East Gate at Blenheim Palace is more the entrance to a
citadel than to a palace. Vanbrugh cunningly slightly tapered the sides
to create an illusion of even greater height and drama: photo by Magnus Manske, 21 October 2005

10 comments:

Americans view thisas a great place to play frisbeeor toss the sacbeside the oldpotato fieldstoo close for comfortcrazy for spices, crazylike crazy monkeyschained to the sillwith no chance of escapeback to the shipunnoticed; never againheld harmless; maroonedtaking the place of peasants.

Horace Walpole was unimpressed by Blenheim Palace, describing it in a letter to George Montagu of 20 May 1736 as "'execrable within, without & almost all round... a quarry of stone that looked at a distance like a great house."

Voltaire, who inspected Blenheim in the Fall of 1727, thought it '"a great mass of stone with neither charm nor taste" and suggested ironically that if the apartments "were but as spacious as the walls thick, the house would be commodious enough."

Jacob Friedrich, Baron Bielfeld, a German visitor to Blenheim, reported his reactions in a letter on 10 March 1740: "This building (Blenheim) has been severely censured, and I agree that it is not entirely exempt from rational censure as it is too much loaded with columns and other heavy ornaments. But if we consider that Sir John Vanbrugh was to construct a building of endless duration, that no bounds were set to expense, and that an edifice was required that should strike with awe and surprise even at a distance; the architect may be excused for having sacrificed, in some degree, the elegance of design to multiplicity of ornament."

The nineteenth-century English architect Sir Robert Smirke, a proponent of the Greek Revival style that opposed itself to Vanbrugh's heavyweight version of English baroque, expressed a certain professional consensus: "Heaviness was the lightest of (Vanbrugh's) faults... The Italian style...which he contrived to caricature...is apparent in all his works; he helped himself liberally to its vices, contributed many of his own, and by an unfortunate misfortune adding impurity to that which was already greatly impure, left it disgusting and often odious."

I love the conception of cosmic justice hinted at in this bluntly disrespectful epigrammatical epitaph -- the roughness of the epitaph only partially excused by the harshness of the genre. The heavier one weighs upon the earth, the heavier it will weigh upon one. Just imagine that formula being applied to the powerhouse businessmen, politicos, entrepreneurs -- not to mention the academic racketeers of "the arts" -- of the present era.